ASUS U2E: Form vs. Function

General Application Performance

We'll start with a look at general system performance. We've said in the past that most systems are now fast enough to easily run most modern applications, and that's true of the ASUS U2E. While it will be clearly slower in CPU intensive applications, for office work it performs well enough.

The ASUS U2E pales in comparison to the slowest of the other laptops we've tested in the above applications. The Gateway P-6831 FX includes a relatively slow Core 2 Duo T5450, but it's still at least 50% faster. None of this makes the U2E "too slow", though we certainly wouldn't recommend an ultraportable for doing 3D rendering or video encoding. We were able to watch a 720p movie encoded with x264 without dropping any frames. (1080p x264 proved to be too much, however, with constant frame drops and audio dropout.)

PCMark Vantage could not run to completion. The Memories test suite consistently failed, as did the Gaming suite. Looking at the tests that did complete, we find performance that is consistently lower than the other notebooks with one exception. The tests that depend on hard drive performance run very well, helped by the solid-state drive. The Productivity suite outscores the Gateway P-6831, and the HDD suite has the ASUS U2E placing at the top of the charts. PCMark05 show similar results for the hard drive, which is to be expected considering the access times can be measured in microseconds rather than milliseconds and the drive delivers high sustained transfer rates.